ZA will not let me access the internet.

My system was taking up to 3 minutes to boot up.
I use Comcast highspeed, with a Linksys wired router.
I
use a corporate edition of
Symantec Antivirus
and keep it updated and run a full scan twice a week.
I am running XP Home, 2 Gb of ram, 80Gb hard drive, more than 65% free space on the drive.
I let windows search for the patches and
add the patches I need.
I
also run Spybot and Pest Patrol.
The system has been slowing down for about a month.
I have booted in safe mode and looked at the start folder.
Nothing out of the ordinary there.

I uninstalled ZA, rebooted and the desktop was up and populated in seconds and I was on line.

I downloaded the current version of ZA free edition installed it, set my preferences and rebooted the system. Same old problem, super long time to populate the desktop and then I had to wait until ZA was running before I could access the internet.
Once the system was up, I could not access the internet.
I checked the settings, the router is in the trusted zone.
Task manager did not indicate anything odd, 2 to 6% CPU usage.
I made sure that the Windows firewall is off.
I have been very happy with ZA free edition for several years now.
So, what am I doing wrong and how do I fix it?